Watch Movements: Watch Fundamentals

What You Need To Know Before Buying A Watch

If you consider yourself a watch connoisseur, you need to know your movements. There are countless companies that can put together a good-looking timepiece and sell it at the mall, but it’s what’s inside the case that separates the men from the boys. The movement is literally at the heart of a watch and of the craft of watchmaking. Why all the fuss? First, you need to learn the basics.

What is a movement? It is the engine inside the watch that drives the hands around and powers any additional complications, such as a stopwatch, date or moonphase display. The most fundamental type of watch movement, or calibre in watchspeak, is the hand-wound mechanical. A simple but ingenious mechanism, this movement consists of a coiled spring that, when wound by turning the crown, stores energy that is then released in a regulated manner, through a series of gears, to keep time. Hand-wound movements, while the oldest form, are still some of the most loved due to their beauty and versatility. All of the most respected brands still produce hand-wound movements, whose decorated splendor is often displayed through a clear caseback.

In the evolution of the movement, the next logical development was the self-winding, or automatic, movement. An automatic does as its name suggests — it winds itself automatically through the motion of your wrist. An oscillating weight — the rotor — in the movement is connected to a gear train that keeps the mainspring wound as long as you wear the watch regularly. Take off your watch for a couple of days, and you’ll either need to wind it up by hand to get it started or give it a few shakes. While the rotor typically hides half of the movement from view at any given time, it is often engraved and decorated and can be a joy to watch spin freely around on watches with a display caseback. Automatics are the most common type of mechanical watch due to their set-and-forget nature.

In 1970, Seiko introduced the world’s first quartz movement, and it revolutionized the watch industry. In a quartz movement, there are far fewer moving parts, and the springs and gear train are replaced by a battery and a quartz crystal. When a small electric charge is applied to a piezoquartz crystal, the crystal vibrates at a specific frequency that is used to regulate the timekeeping of the watch. Quartz movements are found in the great majority of watches sold today due to their low cost, their accuracy and their durability. Most watch connoisseurs dismiss quartz watches as inferior in craftsmanship to mechanical watches, but their merits are undeniable. There are some extremely high-precision quartz movements that are largely immune to the effects of temperature variation and can stay accurate to within a few seconds per year.

Across the watch industry, there are some companies who specialize in movement design and production and then sell to watch brands for use in their own timepieces. But there are some watch brands that design and build their own movements entirely in-house. These brands are known as "manufactures" in horology parlance, and their watches are prized (and priced) above all others for their ingenuity and craftsmanship. Regardless of mechanical, quartz, in-house or outsourced, with watches, it’s what’s inside that counts.